Meeting the Winners of the Makeover Competition

Last night, the group of ladies from small businesses in Hampshire met our lovely competition winners.  All three winners were lovely ladies who were very honest about their reasons for entering the competition, and what they hoped they would gain from the prize.  I can't wait to see the transformation when they go for their makeover!

Here is  picture of Aggi (from Imagenation Photography) with the three winners.

 From left to right:  Dorothy, Jenn and Emma, with Aggi on the far right.

And here is a picture of everyone who attended last night:

Top row (from left to right): Katy (Hair and Make Up), Jenn, Dorothy, Anna (Personal Stylist), and Emma.
Bottom row (from left to right): Lili (Mary Kay Cosmetics), Evelyn (me!) and Aggi (Imagenation Photography)

I believe the date of the makeover and photoshoot has been set to be 18th October, and I hope these well-deserved winners enjoy it!

Makeover Competition Winners Announced!

On 9th June I wrote about a competition that some local business women were running together.

The winner and two runners-up were announced yesterday  The winner will receive a 1h boudoir photo shoot, five 7x5" prints, various pampering sessions and a gift bag full of presents and special offers from local businesses.   The two runners-up will win a 0.5h boudoir photo shoot, three 7x5" prints, pampering sessions and a smaller gift bag.

Everyone who entered the competition will receive vouchers for shopping with the organisers.

Below is a list of the Hampshire business women (and their respective websites) who took part in contributing to this event. 

Aggi Leaver - Photographer - www.ImagenationStudio.co.uk

Anna Zochowski   – Personal Stylist –  http://www.annazochowski.com/

Katie Gulley – Make-up Artist & Hair Stylist  –  http://katiegulleymua.4ormat.com/

Lynn Rich – The Law of Attraction Coach –  http://www.h-h-w.org/

Sarah Hutton  – Massage Therapist –   http://sagetherapies.com/

Lili Julian  – Mary Kay Cosmetics Consultant –  http://www.facebook.com/LLJ.4.Mary.Kay

Patricia Lopez  – Yoga Teacher –  http://www.time4training.co.uk

Henna Hibberd – Personal Trainer –  http://www.berkshirefitness.co.uk/

Jan Morton  – Arbonne Cosmetics Consultant – http://www.janmorton.myarbonne.co.uk/ 
Evelyn Salt  – Inner Fyre Jewellery –  http://www.innerfyre.co.uk/
  
In closing, I'd like to say a huge congratulations to Emma who was the overall winner, and to Jenn and Dorothy - our runners-up.  Everyone should be pampered now and again, and winning a prize like this is definitely the way to do it!   ;-)

Trials of a new website

You may have thought Inner Fyre had gone quiet recently.  You'd be right.

Earlier this year, we lost the code for the Inner Fyre website due to a computer malfunction, and then 3 days later our backup drive (where we kept a backup of the code) also died.

Unfortunate timing that both stores of code disappeared together, yes.  But I like to believe that things happen for a reason.   So my husband and I made the decision to rebuild the whole website, from scratch.  (And back it up to a server this time!)

Why not just use a website template, of which there seem to be many out there?   Well, mainly because I wanted to ensure that my customers had as much choice as possible.   And the majority of templates out there were not as flexible as I needed them to be in order to do that.  Starting with that basic concept in mind, I wrote down what I wanted my customers to be able to do.

While the concept is pretty simple, creating the code to give this functionality is not quite as simple, as we discovered.   On top of that, we wanted to make sure that I had easy administrative control over the content of the site once it was up and running.  In other words, we wanted to ensure that every time I came up with a new design, I could upload it (along with the pricing) easily onto the website.

I also wanted some information pages, so that people who were interested in my jewellery could quickly find out the difference between gemstones, or crystals and pearls.  I wanted to have a page dedicated to information about the different types of commonly requested gemstones.  I wanted to have a permanent offer on one design, which would get rotated randomly every month.  I wanted to have a permanent competition running, with winners drawn monthly.  I wanted people to be able to request gift vouchers for loved ones.   I wanted to be able to display any testimonials.

In other words, I wanted the world!

Luckily for me, my husband is extremely good at writing code for the back-end of websites!  And all these dreams came true.

And this morning, that website went live.   Hooray!